


Dead Weight

by haljake



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, M/M, Science Fiction, Slow Burn, dirk and hal are twins but it's complicated, endgame squad will probably show up but i'll tag that when we get to it, enemies to lovers more or less, rating will be upped accordingly, there will be blood and violence and at some point porn, very slow burn, what's a zombie au without robots, what's better than this: taking these kids from one apocalypse to a different sort of apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2019-11-06 17:20:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17943932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haljake/pseuds/haljake
Summary: When Jake breaks his arm in the middle of the apocalypse - his good shooting arm - he is rendered useless among his friends. Doomed to sit it out inside an empty research facility, he only has an ill-tempered, solar-powered AI to talk to.





	1. Boring

It happens in the most boring way possible.

In days and weeks to come, that is what will strike Jake as one of the few funny things about it. Ever since the world ended, he has held and handled more guns than ever before, which is saying something. Both Jane and Dirk have tried to get him acquainted with more close-range weapons, which went badly in both cases. He’s gotten a few cuts and bruises, yes. A number of insect bites, too. He has wrestled, face to face, with the undead, and he has gotten hurt.

But somehow, he managed to get through it all without any serious injuries.

Roxy broke her ankle once, the way people are supposed to break their ankles in this type of scenario. It was a huge kerfuffle, a whole pile of undead trying to get to her, all her friends struggling to kill the assailants without hurting her in the chaos. She came out unbitten through some sort of miracle, but with bloodied bones sticking out from the ripped skin of her leg.

That was back when more people were still around, and a person with a broken ankle could still be brought to a doctor. Roxy got surgery and a cast and some rest, while Jake and Jane and Dirk paid for the good doctor’s services by sticking around and helping out for a while.

Things are different now. When Jake breaks his arm, nobody really knows what to do.

It happens so boringly. Earlier in the day, he and Roxy were helping Dirk and Jane with shooting practice. They both have bad eyesight and worse aim, but Jane has been doing alright. Dirk, as Jake and Roxy think, is doing bad on purpose, out of spite. And really, Jake can appreciate a penchant for close-quarters combat, and Dirk  _ does _ excel at that, but these days, sometimes, a gun is just the simpler choice. That way if you see something climbing over the barbed wire fence from your top floor window, you can get rid of it then and there without having to meet it halfway, face to face.

This sort of argumentation, of course, is lost on Strider. Helping him adjust his stance usually ends up awkward, because Dirk used to be into Jake and Roxy used to be into Dirk. Shooting practice is always a sort of tense situation, because it’s dangerous, and they can’t exactly afford to waste bullets, and if they go for too long the noise will attract walkers. They had to pack up quickly after seeing a big group of them approach over the horizon, and ended up holing up inside the farmhouse they’ve been staying at, and blocking the door with an old fridge.

Something easily could have happened during that whole process. To any of them. They’ve all gotten somewhat good at this, but nobody is free of fault. They’re tired and hungry at any given moment, and accidents happen. That’s normal.

They just usually turn out to be a bit more spectacular than Jake slipping and crashing down the stairs.

He can feel himself sitting up after the fall, but all he can see is a blinding sort of white, and all he can focus on is the pain searing up his arm. Somewhere, detachedly, he can hear someone scream, and only when the fog between his temples clears a little does he realize that it is him.

Roxy, Jane, and Dirk are already crouching around the crumpled heap he’s being on the floor once his vision comes back to him, all talking at once. All Jake knows is that his arm feels like it was sawed off at the elbow, and when he looks down at it, for a brief second he feels like passing out then and there.

Then he remembers where and who he is, and the fact that he’s seen worse. It’s just that there is an ugly bump in the middle of his forearm now, where the whole thing makes a weird, unnatural curve, like there is a glitch in the Matrix of his anatomy. Jane is holding his arm with both hands, gingerly, and if Jake focuses enough, he can feel the icy cold of her fingers on his burning skin.

Feebly, Jake says, “Holy shit flippin’ Dickens.”

“Yeah,” Roxy says.

“Dude, we have to set the bone,” says Dirk. When both Jane and Roxy turn to look at him, he gets that expression on his face, the unique expression that only shows up when he realizes that he just made himself sound smarter than he is, so people will expect him to be able to do things. Like someone in that split second of realization that they were shoved into a cold pool of water, Jake thinks. He can’t feel his fingers.

“Do you,” Jane says slowly, “know how to do that, Dirk?”

Dirk looks at her, then at Jake’s arm, then back at her. “Uh,” he says. “Don’t you?”

Before the world ended, Jane was helping out at a hospital to pay into her college fund, which has led to her having some useful knowledge about med stuff in the past few months. Most of the time though, it only led to everyone else having expectations of her that put the same annoyed look on her face she’s wearing right now.

“No, I don’t,” she hisses. “I don’t think either of us does. Or do we?”

“Not any more than what I’ve seen in movies,” Roxy admits, while Jake regains just enough control over his body to figure out how to shake his head. “Do we have any painkillers left?”

“We still have a full bottle,” Dirk says, and Jake tries to breathe a sigh of relief that comes out as a shaky whine. “But then what? This doesn’t look like we can just slap a bandage on it. Is there any working hospital still close to here?”

While Jane and Jake shake their heads, Jake catches Roxy throwing Dirk a glance, almost as if she’s pleading with him. Dirk looks back at her with a rare twitch in his face, and wildly, Jake thinks that he’s seen that on the faces of feral animals right before baring their teeth.

“No,” Dirk says. Simultaneously, Jane blinks at him and Roxy narrows her eyes. “No, Rox, we can’t go back there.”

“Would you take a look at Jake’s goddamn arm,” Roxy says, “and then say that again?”

“Rox, these people are  _ evil,” _ Dirk says, and Jake watches realization dawn on Jane’s face.

“So?” Roxy says. Jake thinks he feels tired and wide awake at the same time. His arm hurts so bad he wants nothing more than to pass out, but it also doesn’t seem like he will ever be able to sleep again. “They never kept us there against our will or anythin’. We’ll just get his arm fixed and fuck off again.”

Dirk opens his mouth and closes it again, then shifts where he’s crouching on the floor. Jake watches him, blurry around the corners, and remembers something.

“Oh,” he says softly. He hasn’t been talking a lot, so Dirk flinches when he hears him. “You mean the place where your brother is.”

Now Dirk looks like he might throw up. “Was,” he says, and Roxy snorts.

“Look, Strider, your manpain is valid and everything and I goddamn miss him too, you know, but  _ Jake’s forearm presently makes a goddamn curve.” _

“What is it, like,” Jane says softly, “a one-day walk?”

“Roughly,” Dirk says, resigned. He looks at Jake, and swims in and out of focus. “Think you can do that?”

“If you get me high enough on funny pills,” Jake says, “I’ll try.”

  
  


As it turns out, he can’t actually do it.

Leaving the house requires some precautions. None of them are sure how long they’ll be staying gone, but they have to assume a few days minimum, and by the time they get back, someone else might as well have found and started inhabiting it. That’s how things go these days, and nothing you can actually hold against anyone anymore.

So they need to pack as many supplies as they can, without slowing themselves down. Jake offers to carry a backpack at least, he won’t need his hand for that, but nobody gives him anything. His hands feel cold and wet, and the back of his shirt is sticking to his skin uncomfortably in the cool autumn air.

Jane has to help him strap on his gas mask. People used to say the virus was airborne -- Roxy, by now, doesn’t even call it a virus anymore. She says she’s not sure what it is, which Jake finds a hell of a lot scarier than just the big V word. You can’t get it by just breathing regular air, only by being bitten or by breathing in close vicinity to a dead body. So in the house, they didn’t have to worry. Out here, usually, a dead body is only about as far away as the nearest spider.

The mask doesn’t help. Well -- it helps keeping Jake uninfected, of course. That is, if the theories are right. What the mask doesn’t help with is keeping a clear head, or even clear vision. The further they go, the fainter he feels, staring through the dirty glass in front of his eyes  _ (and _ through his own glasses, which could also use a wipe), listening to his own breath, unnaturally loud in this thing. Every few steps or so, he feels like he might be falling over again, and the mere terror in imagining how his instincts would make him outstretch his broken arm to catch himself is, he thinks, the only thing keeping him bipedal.

He took a bunch of painkillers before they left, washed them down carefully with as little water as he could without choking himself, and they helped for a while. They sure made his arm throb less, but now they, too, make him feel like he’s not even fully present. Everything seems cloudy and unreal, fuzzy in the same way as the world looks when he hasn’t gotten enough sleep and can’t find his glasses. His arm now feels like there is already a cast around it, only it wasn’t done right and all he knows is weird pressure in weird places. Sometimes he will get the urge to wiggle his fingers just to see if he still can, and a stray spark of pain will shoot up to his shoulder and the back of his neck, shake him awake for a few seconds, until his hand goes numb again.

He can’t tell if the others are talking or not. They were at some point, he knew then, but he didn’t follow what it was about. He feels sweaty and gross, and keeps telling himself that Jesus Christ Jake, it’s just a broken arm, people have had worse! And he thinks that he would be fine if he was in a bed with clean air, probably. He thinks it wouldn’t be this big a deal if he didn’t have to keep walking, so much. Every step is a new piece of work, and every time he sees his horridly crooked arm come into view he wants to throw up into his gas mask. Yeah he’s seen worse, but that doesn’t make it any less gross.

At some point, several hours in, if he had to guess, Jake blinks, once, and then when he opens his eyes again, he’s sitting on a tree stump and wheezing. Jane is asking him questions he doesn’t get, and he hears himself make a noise that just sounds pitiful, and feels embarrassment run hot down his spine. The girls exchange a look. Then Roxy takes Jane’s backpack, and Dirk helps Jane get Jake on her back instead.

With his arms slung around her, every one of Jane’s steps sends vibrations through his injury that make Jake want nothing more than to just black out, but he’s too grateful for not having to walk to say anything about it. If he cries into his gas mask a little, nobody will notice.

  
  


Dirk paves the way for them, with both Roxy and Jane carrying most of the weight. He’s always been quick and efficient, and in between sliding in and out of consciousness, Jake watches him sneak forward and decapitate zombies before they can get to them. The sight has never made him nauseous until just now, but it might just be the movement. He closes his eyes and tries to think of something else, because he doesn’t know how vomiting into a mask would work and isn’t keen to find out.

  
  


By the time the sun starts setting, Jake is on his own two feet again. When they asked him if he thought he could walk the rest, he didn’t exactly feel like he could, but he didn’t want to keep bothering Jane either, so he’s been doing his best. The pain meds have been wearing off and Jake doesn’t want to ask for more, mostly because feeling like someone parked their car on his arm seems to be the only thing keeping his eyes open as he trudges forward in between the others.

Dirk and Roxy know the way, and nobody is expecting him to do much fighting, so he hasn’t exactly been paying attention. The ground beneath his feet has been changing from soft soil to hard concrete, so the information that they’ve been walking on a road has reached his mind at some point, but he didn’t consciously think about it. When he looks up and the DERSE Research Facility grows out of the horizon like a dormant beast, he almost makes a surprised noise.

“Okay,” Roxy says instead, as they approach the gate in the wired fence surrounding the thing. “The people in there are… Well, they’re not good guys, is all. They could’ve stopped all this from happenin’ and they didn’t, but y’all know that. We’ve talked about it. I’m just sayin’ they’re shitheads, but they got nothing on us, alright? So don’t sweat it. We go in there, we get medical attention, we piss off again. We stick together at all times, and we only say whatever’s necessary. All on board?”

“What about Dirk’s brother?” Jane says. Jake thinks he can feel Dirk tense up next to him, even though that’s bullshit. He can’t even feel his own hand. “You said he’s in there?”

“Was,” Dirk says again. “It’s… He’s-- It’s complicated. You’ll see when we get there.”

“Okay,” Jane says. “Thank you, Captain Ominous.” She puts a hand in between Jake’s shoulder blades, where his sweater is heavy with cold sweat and sticking to him, and Jake thinks that she is a hero.

When they come closer, Jake can make out an intercom mounted to the side of the gate. He watches Dirk raise a hand to press a button on there, but a big red light flashes at the top of the gate and instead, a voice comes out of the speakers.

_ “What do you guys want here?” _

There’s something off about the voice, Jake thinks, something uncanny. It’s a bit like the first time he heard Dirk speak, only worse. Like a human trying to imitate a robot trying to imitate a human. Just a bit too mechanical to sound natural, but then too organic to sound fake.

“Open up,” Dirk says, in the same tone he always has. “We got a medical emergency.”

_ “You look fine to me,”  _ the voice says, and Jake looks around. He can’t tell where the camera is in this place, but by now, his vision is cloudy at best.

“We’ve got a broken arm,” Roxy says, leaning over Dirk to get close to the intercom through her mask. “C’mon, what’s your beef? Open up.”

_ “There’s no one here who could help you.” _

“What?” Dirk says. He’s louder now, Jake thinks. But he’s not too sure about it.

_ “The situation in here? It ain’t pretty. I can open that gate, but y’all are gonna have to keep your masks on at all times. And there is no one here who could help you with a broken arm.” _

“Oh, hell,” Dirk says -- or at least Jake thinks that’s what he says. Actually, he might have said  _ Oh, Hal?  _ “What did you  _ do?” _

“Look,” Roxy says instead of waiting for an answer to that question. “You still got a connection to the archives in there?”

_ “Yes. I can hook you up with manuals on the human body and a good old YouTube tutorial on how to set a broken bone. That’s not the problem. I just need you to know that you’re on your own, and you  _ need  _ to keep your masks on.” _

Roxy says, “We’ll take it.” 

Again, Jake thinks that even through the haze he can tell how Dirk’s entire being tenses up.

Almost completely silent, the gate opens.

  
  


The building is a white monstrosity, huge as in wide, but only one storey tall. At first, Jake thinks his vision is completely shitting with him now, but the closer they get, the clearer he can see that the entire thing does not have any windows. There’s a big grey double door the way they’re headed, and Jake can see a camera over  _ that _ one, but nothing else indicates that you could look outside from in there. He doesn’t really like the thought of going into this place now, the prison-look of it all getting him way more uncomfortable than all the warnings about the people that might be waiting for them, but his fucking arm fucking hurts.

They stop in front of the door, and it stays eerily still. Jake flinches when the voices says,  _ “Weapons at the ready. English, you too, if it’s humanly possible.” _

“Hal, what the  _ fuck _ is going on in there?” Dirk says, but he’s holding his sword with his left, so Jake fumbles to get at least one of his guns out of its holster. He’s going to suck pretty bad at aiming, but he might thwart an assailant, at least.

The voice says,  _ “Death.” _ Then the doors open.

The voice was right.

In another life, when this all was just starting to happen, Jake was delighted to find out that the undead do, in fact, groan. They gargle and they snarl, and make any other sort of noise that doesn't require a lot of tongue movement and might be featured extensively in a Goosebumps book. It's as unsettling as it is convenient, often making their location obvious for anyone who knows what to listen for.

Right now, it feels deafening.

The doors opened and closed behind them, to lead them into a sort of foyer, a wide empty space populated by a reception desk, seats screwed to the floor, several upturned potted plants, and about fifty zombies.

Roxy murmurs, “Shit almighty.” Jake is inclined to agree.

“Stay close together,” Jane says. She's holding her rolling pin, which only sounded like a silly close combat weapon until it was about as covered in dried blood as baseball bats in movies like to be. “Don't shoot if you don't have to. We keep noises to a minimum and only kill those that get too close, to save time. Dirk, Roxy, lead the way to the… medical wing?”

“Something like that,” Dirk says. He decapitates a corpse wearing an extremely filthy lab coat, and starts moving towards the right side of the room. “It's not far.”

With his right arm dangling uselessly at his side, Jake's left clutches the gun like his-- well. Like his life depends on it. The other three stay close by him, knowing well that he's not of much use like this, and they inch forward as one. They all know how to move through herds of zombies without causing a ruckus, how to be quiet and only use silent force when necessary, but this is different. These things have been trapped in here for who knows how long, and the four of them are the first whiff of life, blood, and brains they get. As Jake dodges out of the way a few times, all he can hear is the varying sounds of death. The squelch of Roxy’s bayonet piercing a head; the meaty swish of Dirk’s blade cutting through a neck; the dull thud of a wooden rolling pin crushing bones. And again, and again, and again, the lifeless sound of bodies crumpling to the floor. There are so many of them, and naturally, it doesn’t take long for one to close in on Jake.

By mere instinct, his trigger finger twitches into position, but he fights the urge. Jane is right. Loud noises mean more zombies, and in an enclosed space like this, Jake doesn’t quite feel like blowing his own eardrums out either. Even with just one hand, switching from holding the grip to holding the barrel goes quick and easy, and yet his arm feels heavy when Jake lifts it to smash the zombie’s skull in with his gun.

The bone makes a cracking noise, and the head caves in like wet paper maché. Jake assumes that heads shouldn’t actually be this soft -- he has never tried to break a living person’s skull, but he can’t imagine it would be this easy. This method has helped him through a number of scuffles already, but it never ceases to be disconcerting to feel a bone give way under his impact like this.

What used to be a man in a presumably clean suit goes down with one last, weak groan, and Jake hurries to stay close to his friends. “English, you good back there?” Dirk calls from up ahead, his voice muffled and distorted through his mask.

“Fine,” Jake lies. The undead are swimming in and out of focus, and the next time he swings his gun at one, he misses. “How much farther?”

“Almost there,” Dirk says. “Hal, open the doors.”

_ “The pod bay doors?” _ the voice says. Jake can’t tell which direction it’s coming from. He manages to kick someone in the stomach and away from him, but stumbles a bit in the process. To his left, Roxy extends an arm to brace him like she used to do with anyone in the passenger seat of her car when she hit the brakes too hard.

Dirk says, “Hal, now’s not the motherfucking time,” and Jake hears the mechanical swishing of doors sliding open.

Their group moves, and suddenly walls are closer and Jake deduces that this has to be some sort of corridor. Behind him, the doors close with a wet squelch and he tenses, turns around to check which part of a zombie just got squished in that process, but he’s suddenly engulfed by darkness.

For a solid second, Jake wonders if he has passed out again. Then he realizes he can still feel his body, can still very much feel his broken, throbbing arm, and that with the doors sliding shut all light was eliminated from this corridor.

“We got lights?” Dirk asks from somewhere, maybe three feet away from Jake. Jake wants to reach out to feel around for his friends, but his only movable hand is still holding the gun and he doesn’t dare to let go of it.

_ “I’m trying to save energy,” _ the voice says.  _ “Y’all got flashlights?” _

“We’re trying to save batteries,” Dirk snarls, but before he even finishes, the outer shell of his gas mask gets illuminated by a small circle of warm light.

“Jesus, you two,” Roxy says, holding her flashlight high, as she passes Dirk. “Let’s just go.”

With that, Roxy leads the way, shining the light down a narrow, plain corridor. There’s nothing on the walls, Jake realizes, except for two zombies leaning against one several feet up ahead. He notices another overturned flowerpot, and one still standing, with the plant inside so perfectly intact that he can only assume it’s fake. There are fewer undead here, and Jake thinks that the lack of groaning and snarling around them should have hit him earlier, but he can hear himself breathe so loudly now that listening for other noises is starting to get sort of hard.

Blood is rushing between his temples, until he can hear his own pulse beat in his ears. In some weird way, it feels like the broken bone isn’t even the biggest problem anymore, with everything else it brought with it. His right hand varies between being uncomfortably numb and feeling thick and swollen and heavy; his shoulder aches from how tense he’s been; his head hurts, his mouth dry, mind foggy -- his feet are made of lead, and he wants nothing more than to just sit down. Every gulp of air he gets seems thick and stale, like no oxygen is left for him, and they can saw his arm off if they need to, so long as he just gets to sit somewhere and take this damn mask off.

The fleshy sound of Dirk’s sword cutting through someone’s neck comes from the front, and when Jake tries to throw a look over his shoulder to check if there are any zombies behind him, he once again almost stumbles and falls. This time, he catches himself, with Roxy being busy lighting the way. It takes him several seconds to orientate himself afterwards, because suddenly there are two beams of light, but as it turns out, Jane just also took out her flashlight and is following Jake’s genius idea to check behind them.

There’s nobody there. The closed metal doors and the overturned flowerpot they passed lie in dim silence. At the foot of the door, Jake thinks he recognizes a severed arm and half a shoe.

“You’re looking really unsteady,” Jane says to him, so softly that Jake can barely hear it with two masks between them.

“I feel pretty darn unsteady,” Jake says. He, in turn, has no idea whether or not he is speaking softly. He’s not even sure if he said anything out loud at all. It’s hard to tell, sometimes, when you can’t even see people’s facial expressions.

Jane turns her head towards Dirk and Roxy, and startles upon realizing that they’re already several feet ahead of them. When Jake follows the beam of her flashlight, he sees Roxy smash a corpse’s head in with the butt of her rifle, and then kick the body to the side. When he creeps closer and really squints his eyes, he can tell that she’s standing in front of a door.

“Alright, Hal,” she says. Jane’s hand is back on Jake’s damp back, to steer him towards that door faster than he would have been alone. “Tell me there ain’t no new horrors behind this one.”

_ “No, this part’s clean,” _ says the voice.  _ “I didn’t want them anywhere near me.” _

The single door swings open to the inside. Belatedly, what the voice said registers with Jake and he wonders if they’re going to be meeting Dirk’s brother in there, whatever exactly that means. Dirk has been vague at best about it all, and Jake isn’t sure if he can really care for meeting a new person in his current state.

But as overhead lights blink open, all he sees is another lifeless room. “Thanks for the lights, Hal,” Jane says as the flashlights click off. Jake looks around and barely suppresses a shiver; the room sure looks like something made with medical procedures in mind. It looks cold and sterile, with five stretchers placed neatly in two rows, two on the left and three on the right of what looks like some sort of TV terminal in the center, a round column with screens going all the way around, and a keyboard underneath each of them. The really bad part, however, that really makes the hair at the back of Jake’s neck stand up, is the very back of the room. The entire back wall seems to be one big array of closed morgue coolers.

_ “No problem,” _ the voice says. One of the screens blink on, and Jake half expects to see a face there, a live call to whoever the hell has been talking to them, but all his blurry vision detects is some sort of file archive.  _ “Sit him down, I’ve pulled up some relevant videos. You can take your masks off in here.” _

There is a full second of hesitation, which Jake barely notices, because as soon as the words have been uttered, his body slumps to the floor like it was just waiting for permission to sit. His knees hit the ground first, then his ass, and then, unfortunately, his right hand, which sends an almighty spark of pain right up to the right side of his neck, and he cries out.

“Jesus fuck,” Dirk says from somewhere close. Jake blinks, but his vision makes no sense, then he blinks again and realizes that his gas mask is being pulled from his face. “Oh, you look like shit, dude.”

_ “There’s rations in the fridges to the right. Bottled water should be in the one labeled C-3. Med supply is behind all doors labeled A.” _

“Thank you, Hal,” Roxy says. From the corner of his vision, Jake sees her moving. At least he thinks that’s her.

“These people still had  _ rations?” _ Jane says, in a loud whisper that sounds more like an angry hiss.

“Told you they’re evil,” says Dirk. His hand on Jake’s shoulder feels as cold as Jake’s sweat. “Alright, just lie down here. Ain’t no use in trying to get you up on one of those stretchers, I think. You lie down, we’ll get you all you need. We’ll figure it out.”

“‘Kay,” Jake hears someone say who seems to have control over his voice. Awkwardly, Dirk’s hand guides him to the floor, and Jake immediately feels bile climb up his throat. He swallows it back down. Water can’t come quick enough. His arm feels like a giant is just standing around on it.

“Hal, can you see his arm?” Roxy says, somewhere to his right. Jake closes his eyes, and hears the rustling of plastic containers. Something rips open, and he tries to feel good about it. “Do you have useful footage for that?”

_ “Yes. I can start playing now, if you want.” _

“That’d be grand.”

With a brief beep, one of the screens turns on. There are no voices, only static, but nobody in the room complains, so Jake just assumes there’s some sort of helpful visual.

_ “That arm looks awful, dude,” _ says the voice.  _ “How’d it happen?” _

Jake squeezes his eyes shut. The farmhouse they occupied mere hours ago feels like it’s several days away from here. “Fell down the stairs,” he croaks.

_ “Damn,” _ Hal says.  _ “That’s, like, the most boring way in the world to break your arm.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haljake good. just trust me bro  
> more coherent worldbuilding to come next chapter!


	2. Not Human Anymore

Jake barely knows anything about Dirk’s brother.

He knows his name is Hal, but Dirk barely ever calls him that, for some reason. Roxy does, though. He knows he and Dirk are twins, but he doesn’t even know if they’re identical or fraternal. Years and years back, Jake remembers, Dirk sent them all a picture of him and his brother standing next to each other in some pitiful parched Texas backyard, and they looked extremely similar then, but they were still little kids in the picture and he still wasn’t sure.

That was the only time he ever saw Hal’s face.

When they all started talking, after they got to know each other, Hal tried to be part of their circle a few times. Jake remembers that, too. They were all living miles and miles apart from each other and only talking online, and Hal’s messages started pop up just a few days after Jake had first talked to Dirk. The way they both talked was so similar that Jake didn’t catch on at first, and just assumed he was speaking to Dirk. That only worked until he dropped the name in conversation, and then both he and Hal ended up a little confused.

He told Dirk about it afterwards, assuming it was funny enough to goof around about a little. As it turned out, Dirk didn’t find it funny at all. He seemed mad, actually, and back then, Jake was beyond relieved to realize that Dirk was angry with his brother, and not with Jake. Times had been… well, lonely, and Jake was happy to make friends. As long as he and Dirk were fine, he supposed he didn’t have to worry much about that mystery brother.

Dirk used to tell him things about Hal anyway, in the beginnings. Especially after that first time they had accidentally talked. Dirk said Hal was manipulative and mean, and unable to hold a friendship for longer than a few weeks until he would start “destroying” everyone he talked to. Jake wasn’t even sure what all that was supposed to mean, but Dirk seemed very serious about it. His brother was dangerous, Dirk said, and so Jake didn’t talk to him again.

Or tried to, at least. Now and then, Hal would still sneak into his messages. Apparently, Jake learned, he liked to steal Dirk’s phone or highjack his computer, and then he would pose as his brother online until Jake usually got suspicious. Jake got better and better at sniffing him out whenever it happened, and always made sure to tell him to sod off and leave him and Dirk alone, and he is pretty sure that sooner or later Hal just gave up.

After that, he didn’t hear from him for years. Dirk seemed happy enough not talking about him again, so Jake didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know, anyway. They were all becoming better and better friends, and it made life less awful, and that was all he wanted to care about.

Roxy and Jane did talk to Hal sometimes, but Jake only knew through fleeting, vague comments he never followed up on. He didn’t get why they would, if Dirk had given them the same warning he had given him. But he didn’t want to jeopardize the friendship to the girls either, so, again, he didn’t ask.

Then, the world ended.

By the time the outbreak happened, Jake was in his late teenage years and had been living on the island alone for quite a while. Both his cousin Jade and their adoptive mom had left for the mainland long ago, for a research project that Jake would only learn years later had to do with this virus. Roxy was talking about staying at a facility with Dirk, while Dirk was barely ever around anymore, and Jake had trouble keeping up with whatever was happening where all the other humans were. He figured he was going to be safest on Hellmurder Island and would just stay there, but everyone else’s internet connection was starting to get spotty, and he didn’t want to risk being alone again. He tried to convince them all to just come to him, take the next flight in and be where nobody else was and could get infected, but neither of them wanted to leave. Jane was too convinced of her work at the hospital, and Dirk and Roxy only kept telling him that they had to stay with the facility, because they were doing something important there.

So when he was suddenly unable to reach anyone for three days straight, the fear got too much. Jake steered his boat to the nearest airport and got the cheapest ticket he could find, which led him to Jane. Shit was really hitting the fan by then, with people dying and coming back left and right -- Jake couldn’t reach anyone from his own family but wanted to trust in scientists to figure something out, so he thought they could maybe stay with Dirk and Roxy. But while he and Jane got ready for their trip, their friends reemerged from their dead cell zone with messages saying they were leaving the facility, because everything had gone, as Roxy put it, entirely tits up.

It was right about then that Jake wondered, for the first time in a very long time, what had happened to Dirk’s twin brother.

But Dirk didn’t want to talk about it. And, what was very rare, neither did Roxy, it seemed. She just looked uncomfortable and sad when Jake or Jane asked about Hal, and Jake figured the fact that it was only Dirk and Roxy who had left the facility kind of spoke for itself.

All three of them had been there, Jake knew that much. It was a different sciency thing than what Jade got up to, but it still involved a whole bunch of words he didn’t understand and didn’t care to look up. Dirk had said something about bioengineering, Roxy had told him about a project with genetics that she was going to take part in as preparation for college, and that Hal was involved in a mix of the two. They had joined just before the outbreak, back when things like college preparation were still useful, and when they left, they both seemed shaken by whatever happened there.

Jake thought that maybe, if the people there were so bad, and Hal had not decided to leave with his family, Dirk really had been right about him all along.

The longer he lies on his back here, on the floor in this room that is miraculously safe and empty when everyone else in the building has gotten killed somehow, the future of his arm depending largely on whatever footage Hal projects on the TV screens, the less convinced Jake is of this entire plan. Where  _ is _ Hal, anyway? Nobody else seems to be concerned about that, Jake thinks, staring at the ceiling while Dirk joins the girls bustling around next to him. He wonders how much material they really need to deal with his arm. People in movies just brace these things with a stick and some belts.

The bright whirl of Roxy’s curls shows up in his vision, and he turns his head to his left to see her crouch down next to him. She’s holding something in her hands that looks like a palm-sized piece of plastic that Jake can’t really make sense of, and the look on her face is so openly apologetic it makes his stomach twist a little.

“Hey, how you feelin’?” she asks. She sounds the part, too. Jake doesn’t like this.

“Bad,” he says. “Can we get on with it, maybe?”

“Yeah, in a second,” she says. She fiddles with the thing in her hands, then holds it out to him. “Uh, we found this mouthguard. Figured maybe you wanna bite down on something while Dirk and Jane set your arm. I’ll stay here with you, so you can just focus on me, okay?”

Jake feels like all of his inner organs disappear momentarily and then rematerialize in his throat. “Su-Sure,” his mouth says. “Can’t you just-- uh, don’t they have, I don’t know, fucking, tranquilizers here?”

“It’ll be over really quickly,” Roxy says. She reaches down, and Jake thinks that she might be grabbing his hand, which would be nice, but she puts the mouthguard in his hand instead. It feels cold and more solid than he thought it would. “I promise. C’mon, Jake, please.”

He closes his eyes, squeezes them shut, and takes a breath. The air smells like his own sweat. The mouthguard is uncomfortable and boxy when he puts it between his teeth, tasting like plastic and chemicals. He doesn’t open his eyes again, but he nods.

“Okay,” Roxy says. She does take his hand, now -- Jake’s own fingers feel clammy between hers, but Roxy’s are cold, too. At the same time, Jake feels one pair of hands grabbing his elbow and another pair grabbing his other hand. He wants to cry very badly. Next to him, Roxy swallows and says, “Okay, Jakey, I’m gonna count to three, alright? You wanna look at me? Y… Okay, just, just listen to my voice then, alright? I’m gonna count to three. One.”

On  _ two, _ Jake -- in that order -- hears a loud crack, then feels a jolt going through his arm, then a surge of pain racing up his shoulder. He opens his mouth to yell, but that just makes the mouthguard come loose and fall in further, and what comes out of him is just a choked gargle.

“Alright,” Roxy says. “See? That was it. Now we just have to hope we picked the right brace size for you-- What? Oh.”

Somewhat frantically, Jake has been shaking his hand free from her grasp, so he can reach up and pull the goddamn mouthguard back out before he chokes on it. He coughs, upper body twisting, but from his right, Dirk pushes him back down with a hand on his aching shoulder.

“Sorry, man,” Dirk says. Jake isn’t looking. Either he can’t see or his eyes are still closed -- he’s not entirely sure. “We’re not done yet.”

“What-- Again?” Jake asks, feebly, the cold floor pressing up hard against his sweat-soaked back.

“No, it’s set,” Jane says. She sounds tightly wound and stressed, and Jake wishes he didn’t catch that. He doesn’t  _ usually _ catch on to clues like that, why now? “But we still have to get your arm into this brace, because we can’t make you a cast. So… You might not like that.”

_ “Better put the mouthguard back in,” _ the disembodied voice says, and Jake flinches so hard it feels like his arm just broke all over again.

“Jesus Fuck,” he mutters. Then he puts the mouthguard back in.

Jane was right. She and Dirk collectively pushing his broken arm through a brace that seems to be made of the world’s scratchiest fabric and yet somehow as rigid as metal is not enjoyable. It doesn't work at first, so they have to wrestle his arm back out and try a different brace. Jake only knows this because Jane announces what they're doing to him; his eyes stay firmly closed, and all he can really feel on his right side is a muddy wall of solid pain. Roxy is still holding his hand, and she tells him things now and then, that it's almost over and that he's doing so well, but Jake knows he's whimpering into his mouthguard and crying through his squeezed shut eyes, so he's not inclined to agree.

Eventually, the tightness around his forearm seems to be permanent, and settles into Jake's consciousness as an almost comforting presence. Eyes still closed, he turns his head to the side to spit out the mouthguard, and takes several deep, shuddering breaths. He wishes the others would stop looking at him -- he can't know for sure, unwilling to look himself, but he doubts they aren't.

He wishes hard, prays almost, to be left alone with his pain, until he hears Dirk say, “Can we give the poor guy more painkillers now?” And as far as Jake is concerned, that's the best damn thing he's gotten to hear all day.

His friends sit him up just long enough to down a small handful of pills with a bottle of water. The voice with them says something, but he barely pays attention. He gets drowsy fast, and Dirk somehow has a pillow in his hands now that they put underneath his head when he lies back down. Jake feels like he hasn't slept in several weeks -- and, truly, what he does now barely even feels like sleeping. It feels like he finally, finally, just gets to black the fuck out.

  
  


He wakes to more pain. Jake slides into consciousness and the feeling of a truck parked on his arm is strangely familiar already, which as a thought alone is almost enough to get him to well up again. Instead, he groans, and moves his left hand to hold his arm with it, as if that could help in any way.

It’s then that he notices the blanket. The fabric feels scratchy against the back of his hand, and then the rest of his arm, then, slowly, he recognizes the slight weight on his whole body. Blinking his eyes open, he feels the blanket with his hand instead of holding his arm, thinking foggily that someone must have put that on him while he was out. The room around him is dark and silent, but he recognizes all the metal cupboards even in the darkness, and the obelisk with switched off TV monitors sitting eerily in the middle of the room. He must have slept on the floor, but even that feels softer, and after patting around some, Jake realizes that he’s lying on a bunch of blankets, too.

Nobody else is talking or moving, but he can hear their quiet, even breaths. They must have set up camp in here.

“Hey,” Dirk whispers, and Jake flinches so bad his feet scramble over the floor like his body is trying to make him get up and run away. He sits up instead, and finds a blurry dark shape sitting on the floor to his right, a long object draped over its lap that Jake identifies as a sword. Dirk snorts. “Sorry. Hey. How you feeling?”

“Okay,” Jake whispers back. “My arm hurts. Are you on guard duty?”

Dirk nods. “Place seems secure enough, but we still figured it won’t hurt. Unlike your arm. Sources say that’s gonna keep hurting for a bit, but we found a guide for medicating responsibly. I can go find it.”

“Okay,” Jake says again. “Hey--” In the middle of getting up, Dirk pauses, and even in the darkness, Jake recognizes the carefully blank expression on his face. “Uh… Do you know where my glasses are?”

“Oh,” Dirk says. “Yeah, over here.”

There’s a soft clatter when he grabs Jake’s glasses from the console in the middle of the room, and hands them to him. At least now his outline is a little sharper, as Jake sits and watches him rummage around through drawers. He has never understood how Dirk can do everything so quietly -- it feels like he is watching a video on mute.

As Dirk seems to give up on one drawer and moves on to the next, Jake contemplates the pain in his arm. He would definitely like to have some medication for it right now, but he no longer wants to pass out. It does already feel better than it did during the day, which is profoundly relieving. Back in the day, people used to break their arms all the time -- he saw it so often on TV -- and nobody died from it. He is, probably, going to be alright.

Dirk returns to crouch next to him with a single pill in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. “Sorry,” he whispers. “I was gonna get you something to eat, too, figured you’d be starving, but I dunno where Jane put the cans.”

Jake hasn’t been noticing how empty his stomach is, until the very second Dirk says something. It’s been like that; sometimes, there is just no food around, and they’ve all learned to ignore hunger when it’s inconvenient. It’s not good, but it’s necessary, and Jake definitely forgot all about food until just now. Now, his stomach feels like it has imploded sometime in the past ten hours.

“I am pretty hungry,” he whispers back, and adds a  _ Thanks _ before taking the pill and the water to at least get that out of the way. He almost chokes on it, a second later, when one of the screens in the middle of the room lights up.

It’s still black, but that weird, lighter sort of black screens get when they switch on. In the middle of it, as if someone is typing it right now, red text begins to appear.

**Jane put the rations back into the C-1 fridge.**

“What the fuck,” Jake whispers.

**Sorry. Didn’t wanna use the voice and wake the others, but it seemed like you needed help.**

“Thanks, Hal,” Dirk says with a voice that, even at a volume this low, sounds more like  _ Fuck you, Hal. _ “I didn’t know you were still, uh… Up.”

**I don’t sleep. I thought you knew that.**

**How’s the arm, Jake?**

Jake chooses to take a conveniently timed sip of water at that very moment, and Dirk replies for him anyway. “Look, man, can we get some privacy here? Maybe turn off the mics in this room or something? Focus on literally any other room in the building?”

**You mean all the rooms that are either empty or filled with dead people?**

The text seems to wait for a reply, but nobody says anything. Jake looks away, but when his eyes pick up on movement on the screen again, he can’t help but take another peek.

**Fine. I’ll check back in the morning or something. Good night.**

Dirk mutters something that barely passes as  _ Night, Hal, _ already heading for the fridges. Jake busies himself examining his water bottle. It’s a strange thought, knowing that the creepy voice from the speakers had been watching them all. Watching them sleep, present and not present at the same time, apparently, since it’s just a voice. It’s creepy, Jake decides. He doesn’t like it.

When Dirk returns with a can of cold stew and a very weathered looking metal spoon, Jake tries to stop thinking about it. The fact that a disembodied voice is with them in here was pretty low on his priority list earlier, when his arm was feeling like they were sawing it off. But he can think clearer now, and getting some sustenance in his exhausted body helps even more, and it's weird. Jake tries to piece it all together, but it just seems very weird.

“So. The voice, the text,” he says, watching the can he's eating from so he doesn't have to watch Dirk's whole body stiffen. It's awkward to eat with his non dominant hand in the half darkness of the room, so he needs to focus not to spill anything anyway. “That's Hal? You've been calling it Hal.”

Dirk sighs. This stew doesn't taste like much of anything, Jake thinks, but he's eaten worse things before. “In… In a way, yeah,” Dirk says. Jake has no idea what that's supposed to mean. “I'm sorry if he's creeping you out. He's… He is like that.”

“Is he here?” Jake asks. “In the building, I mean? Like… Where's the voice coming from? From where was he watching us?”

“It's, um,” Dirk says, and then falls silent. Jake has never been too good at estimating time passing, and ever since watches have pretty much become obsolete because nobody cares whether it's two or three PM anymore, he's gotten even worse. It feels like several minutes pass in which Dirk says nothing, and the only sounds in the room are the girls’ heavy breaths and Jake's spoon clanking against the can, but that's probably not right. For as eloquent as Dirk used to be over text, he's not the best at talking with his mouth. Jake knows that. He's learned to wait. “The voice -- that's not really my brother. He says he's still Hal, but he's not, anymore. He isn't, like… He isn't human.”

Jake looks up. These days, the words  _ not human anymore  _ usually mean something very specific. A drop of stew lands on his naked ankle as he takes in Dirk's constipated expression and tries to figure out what to ask first. His mind finally settles on  _ What???,  _ but Dirk is faster.

“Do you want to see him?” he asks.  _ Hell no,  _ Jake thinks. “He's only one room down. I can show you.”

“Is that safe?” Jake says, and feels silly about it a second later. Nothing is ever safe, these days. How ridiculous to even ask.

“He said he kept this part clean, so he probably meant his own room too. I doubt any dead will be there,” Dirk says. That's not really what Jake was asking, but he nods anyway. This is creeping him out, but he's curious too, and this is the most Dirk has ever been ready to disclose about his brother or not-brother, in the entire time Jake has known him for. So he should indulge him. That's probably what a friend would do.

Getting up from the blanket pile substituting for a mattress makes him feel faint and weak in the knees, but he doesn't say anything. It's nothing new, these days, and Jake assumes that it happens to everyone. Nobody here is eating enough or doing particularly well.

“Say, Dirk,” he whispers as he follows Dirk through the room. “How many of those cans do we have here?”

“Enough for at least six weeks, I'd estimate,” Dirk says. “Two months if we're disciplined.”

“Neat,” Jake breathes. Dirk is moving towards the back wall with all the morgue coolers and his stomach is gearing up for some sort of circus performance that might make him lose all the good canned food, but they make a sharp right instead to a door in the very corner of the room. Jake hadn’t noticed it before, but he didn’t exactly take his time examining the room when all he’s done in the past twelve hours (maybe. How much time has passed? He has no idea) is be in pain and sleep.

“We should still go and scavenge a bit more,” Dirk says. The door opens to what seems like a solid wall of black, and Jake hurries to follow when he disappears into it. He can feel Dirk move next to him and close the door, and he gets that it’s to keep noise away from the sleeping girls, but it really is pitch black in here. He flinches at a shuffle of clothes, until he realizes that it’s still Dirk. “To prepare for winter. So uh… You should probably stay here for that.”

“What?” Jake forgets to whisper, because it’s just the two of them here now, and he doesn’t get what Dirk just said to him. He doesn’t want to stay in this room, he thinks, until he realizes Dirk was talking about scavenging and probably just wants him to stay inside in general.

Dirk’s flashlight clicks on, and Jake does his best to get his shocked expression under control. “I mean, that’s your shooting arm, right?” Dirk says, and Jake again has to remind himself what he’s even going on about. “If we end up in shit creek out there we wouldn’t want you to be unable to defend yourself out there.”

_ We, _ Jake thinks. They’ve talked about this, as a trio, while he was out. He shrugs, slowly, and realizes that his shoulder aches like it used to after excessive swimming. His muscles are sore from the stress. “I have two hands,” he says.

“Well, yeah,” Dirk says. He shifts from one foot to the other, holding the flashlight low between them, so it shines up like he’s a kid telling a ghost story at a campfire, like in the movies. “But would you be… We just worry, man, because you’re not as proficient with your left, and generally only having one arm out there doesn’t sound… You know. And this place is creepy, but as far as we’re concerned, it’s ours now, so you’d have somewhere to stay while we’re out. Wouldn’t that be more favorable?”

“You want me to stay with your disembodied non-human brother voice?” Jake says, and watches Dirk’s face twitch -- it never does show much, but the corners of his mouth twist just enough for Jake’s trained eye. This isn’t going the way Dirk wanted it to either. “Sounds like phonus to me, bud.”

“He won’t be a problem,” Dirk says.

Jake raises his arms to cross them, then remembers that one is in a brace and hurts something fierce, so they drop back to his sides uselessly. “Says who?”

“Roxy will talk to him,” Dirk says quietly. “They’re on better terms.”

Jake says, “I see.” He wonders how that conversation went down, between Dirk and Jane and Roxy. How they agreed on him being defenseless now, and probably more of a burden out there than anything useful. Back when all this started, Jake was the only one who could read tracks and knew what plants were edible, but the others have learned since then. They don’t need him if he can’t fight; he’d be a hindrance, if anything. So while his arm heals, he’s supposed to just… stay here? In this windowless fortress filled with corpses? With whatever exactly it is that Dirk’s brother turned into when the world ended? Jake squares his aching shoulders, and clears his throat. “Where is he, anyway? You said he’s in here.”

“Yeah,” Dirk says and moves his flashlight away from his face to illuminate the room instead. “He's around.”

At first, Jake thinks it is just a completely empty room. Then, when the cone of light does a second round, he can make out shapes and lines on the three walls he can see, and it looks like another morgue cooler room, but that’s not right either. There are cables emerging from some of the drawer-looking things, but everything is encased in glass that looks too clean and untouched for the circumstances they are in. The sight wakes something in Jake, memories of movies he watched a lifetime ago, movies with hackers and high tech. It looks like the room is filled with huge desktop computers, but he knows that’s not technically what they are. He’s blanking on the word, until Dirk says,

“This is the server room. It’s where my brother’s consciousness is stored.”

“Oh,” Jake says. “What the ass?”


	3. All Mind, No Body

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took me 4 months...... these writing bones are old and slow

“He got sick,” Dirk says.

The flashlight in his hands makes the glass cases the servers are stored in gleam in an eerie white. The cables coming out of them look like little tentacles, pressing up against the glass. Jake expects them to start writhing any second, but of course they don’t. These days, anything dead coming alive is old news.

“His body was degrading,” Dirk continues, “limb for limb.”

Jake looks at him, and Dirk is staring somewhere far away. His face is looking at the servers -- it’s not a terribly big room -- but his gaze is somewhere entirely else. He looks tired, Jake thinks. The light is bad, of course, making the bags under his eyes look like trenches during war times, illuminating a grimy smudge of dirt across his cheek he either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care about. It’s not like Dirk not to care about what his face looks like. They are all so exhausted.

“We tried to stop it, to help him. But it was no use. He and I eventually gave up on the bioengineering part of it and took inspiration from the work Roxy did for the software in this place instead. We managed to make a copy of his consciousness. Don’t ask how.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Jake says, but he doesn’t think Dirk is listening to him. Dirk doesn’t even look like he realizes Jake is still here. He’s still staring at that far away place, his flashlight shining uselessly into an empty corner of the room. They were going to save batteries, Jake remembers. He could just turn it off, but he probably doesn’t remember he is even holding it.

“That’s what the voice is,” Dirk says. “Some… afterimage. Some save file from how he was before he-- before he died.”

“He died?” Jake asks quietly, but again, Dirk doesn’t even seem to react to him. Belatedly, Jake realizes that Dirk might not be talking to him at all.

“It’s a copy, and I know it seems real, but it’s not. It’s just a summary of what he was like, ruminated and projected back on us to pose as someone who’s not here anymore. My brother is dead. This one… I don’t know. I’m afraid it might have developed a mind of its own, and I don’t trust it.”

It’s his own words that manage to pull Dirk back to the present. Jake watches him blink, watches his eyes dart around before they find Jake’s face and then quickly look away again. Dirk grimaces.

“I don’t know why everyone’s dead here,” he says. “The place wasn’t fucking zombie infested when we left. And you’ve seen how secure it is, so I doubt anyone or anything got in from the outside. And he… it… the  _ voice _ said he kept this part clean, like he played an active role in whatever the fuck went down here. I dunno, Jake,” Dirk says but still doesn’t look at him. He shuffles his feet and shines his flashlight down on the floor to look there, even though there’s nothing to see save for some dust. “I have no idea how the fuck he would even manage, but I’m not convinced he didn’t just kill all these people himself.”

“Great!” Jake says, loud and disruptive enough to make Dirk flinch several inches away from him. “That’s really neat to hear right after your verdict of me having to stay my caboose put in this glorified concrete slab.”

Dirk’s face never does much, but after pulling the corners of his mouth so far down, he is now grimacing even more. His nose wrinkles, and his brows knit together. Jake wonders if he has ever seen him this expressive, and even now he can barely make out half of his face because it’s so dark in here. His voice suspiciously level, he says, “I was outvoted.”

“Huh?” Jake says. “Outvoted on what? Making me stay here? Or making all of us stay here when it’s apparently so dangerous it’s giving even you the heebie-jeebies?”

“No,” Dirk says. Jake waits for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t, so Jake gets the wild urge to strangle him. He can’t do it with one hand, thankfully.

“Fucking criminy,” he murmurs. “You sure just keep balling me up, Strider. You either talk too much or not at all.”

Finally, Dirk actually turns his head to look at him, because he squints at what he said. “Balling you up?”

“Balling me up!” Jake parrots back. “I’m balled up. What? Don’t look at me like that, it’s a figure of speech.”

“Okay,” Dirk says slowly. Jake wishes he had a real cast so he could hit him over the head with it. Before he can finish fantasizing about it, Dirk looks away again, and Jake tries to brace himself for the next monologue. But all Dirk says is, “No, I was outvoted when I suggested deactivating Hal.”

“Oh,” Jake says. He looks around. “Like… Shutting him down like a computer?”

“Pretty much.” Dirk shrugs. “I don’t know if… I mean, I don’t know if--if I could. But I think we should’ve at least considered the option. We should stay in this place because it’s solid and secure and gated and has provisions--it’s fucking solar powered, Jake. It’s good. And you should stay here so you can recover because hell knows we can all use some rest. We didn’t need to vote on that. But Hal… Roxy keeps saying she’ll talk to him, but I don’t know--”

“Can’t I just put a bullet through one of these guys if he tries anything funny?” Jake says and gestures towards the servers. Dirk follows where his hand is pointing and then turns towards him with that look he gets when he feels like he’s dealing with a toddler.

“I would rather you didn’t,” he says.

“Why? Wouldn’t it work?”

“It’d,” Dirk starts saying, thinks it over, and sighs. “It would just be kind of a waste.”

“Of bullets? You know I’d aim right. Just show me where the computer jugular is.”

“Of tech, Jake.”

“Oh.”

“Tomorrow, when he’s busy talking to Roxy,” Dirk says, and moves past him towards the door again, leaving Jake staring into eerie darkness, “I can show you a more elegant way to disable him.”

  
  
  


Growing up, Hal has always had poor eyesight. It runs in the family; everyone always found great fun in watching his and Dirk’s prescription numbers get worse and worse in perfect unison. They had the money for new good looking glasses every year or so, but come puberty, both he and his twin brother got a little too vain to wear them anyway. Their astigmatism made it hard to find proper contact lenses to wear, and eventually, they both developed some misguided sense of pride anyway, as they did with most things. If they were strong and cool enough, they figured, they would be able to navigate the world no matter how blurry it would get. 

And blurry it got.

When they started working here, at this facility, both Hal and Dirk ended up going back to glasses, because there was a lot to read and not many people were looking at them. That phase didn’t last long for Hal, however, because he kind of stopped giving a shit again when his body kept getting worse. Once over thirty percent of it was replaced by prostheses, he found that he didn’t care much for glasses anymore.

So once the only way for him to visibly perceive the world anymore turned out to be security video feeds, it wasn’t actually that much of a downgrade.

It’s dark in the room, so Roxy is in greyscale. Hal and every other electronic in the facility, including the overhead lights, run on solar power, but it’s winter and a lot of his power comes from reserves. So he keeps most of the lights off, and Roxy wants to save batteries, so her flashlight is off, too. She must have found a big candle somewhere (Hal has no idea where or why this place had  _ candles), _ which is enough light for her to see where she is, but not enough for Hal to turn off night vision mode. She looks like a cryptid caught on camera, but is still a sight for sore metaphorical eyes after all those months spent watching zombies shamble about the place.

“How,” Roxy starts. “How have you been?”

“Oh, you know,” Hal says. It seems like the sort of question that felt genuine in her mind, but now that she’s asked it he’s sure nobody really wants to hear the answer. He sure as shit doesn’t want to say it, so he goes for, “Bored out of my mind. And you all? Aside from English’s mishap.”

“Alright, I guess,” Roxy says and shrugs. “Surviving.” She’s sitting cross legged on the floor, looking at her shoes before she tilts her head up to look at the camera Hal is watching her from. It’s the closest they can get to looking each other in the face. It’s strange with no body to feel it in, but Hal is hit with the sudden realization of how much he’s missed her. She looks weary, even on the grainy video, but they all do. “So…” she says. “We’re gonna be staying here, for a while at least. That cool?”

“Of course it’s cool,” Hal says. “Sorry I didn’t get to clean up before you dropped in.”

Roxy snorts, which is the nicest thing Hal has had on his audio feed in weeks. “That’s alright. Place was already a mess when we left.” She shifts and leans back on her hands, and Hal watches her sigh. “So, listen. I know you and Jake aren’t super tight or anything. But when Dirk and Janey and me go out to hunt and shit, I don’t think we should take him with us like this. He’s gonna need some rest, so… If we leave him here with you, is that-- is that gonna work out, pal?”

Hal stays quiet for a bit. That’s what this is about, he thinks. Small talk’s over, and it’s time to talk about the injured man of the hour again. Time to… what? Have him babysit Jake? That doesn’t make sense. Jake is a grown dude and Hal is a voice. And Roxy stressed that she knows he and Jake aren’t best friends, so-- so this is to make sure he and Jake don’t slit each other’s throats, he presumes. If he had eyes, Hal would be rolling them right now. He somehow can’t imagine that Jake got the same talk.

“Why wouldn’t it work out?” he says. That should be a neutral enough version of  _ What the fuck do you think I’ll do to him. _

Just like that, Roxy is looking back at her feet. Hal has no way of looking away from her without focusing on another camera in the building entirely. “Well, just…” she says. Her shoulders are up, her legs crossed tight. Hal can barely remember what that feels like, but he knows what it means. “We just don’t want you two to fight, is all. We don’t know what you’ve been up to here all this time, save for, uh… hanging with all these dead people I guess.” She shifts, and clears her throat, and says, “What happened there, anyway?”

“Pandemonium,” Hal says. “Inevitable, really. Someone got sloppy, released the virus in a lab. Two infected, one claimed he was fine but started showing weird signs anyway. You know these guys were all assholes, now imagine them ganging up on each other. Scalpels drawn, nobody trusts anyone anymore, if you cough you’re dead meat. That’s what happened. They all came for each other’s throats, and I had to sit up here and watch.”

It’s hard to tell with the poor graphics, but he thinks Roxy is grimacing at her legs now. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That must have… That must’ve been terrible, Hal.”

“It wasn’t great,” Hal says.

“I do have a question,” Roxy says. She looks around, then back up again, and there is something on her face that Hal can’t read. “Why is this part clean? How did you… I mean, how did you keep them out?”

“They’re zombies,” Hal says. “You make some loud noise and flash some lights down the hall, they’ll all hobble after it. I closed the doors after them and just kept them in the lobby so they wouldn’t get out and terrorize anyone else. Easy peasy. They’re not particularly smart, you know.”

Roxy takes a second to think about it, and nods. Hal can barely imagine what sort of physical altercations they have all been through out there, and while his lack of arms and hands to hold weapons with troubled him at first, by now he thinks he might have the advantage here. Guiding these things through the building is ridiculously simple, and none of them can bite him. Not as long as they stay out of the morgue coolers.

“That makes sense,” Roxy says finally. Hal wishes it didn’t feel as much like a verdict as it does.

“What did y’all think happened here?” Hal asks, even though he does not want to hear the answer. He doesn’t want to ask the question, either, and he still does. It’s like standing on the side of the road, watching a car crash happen in slow motion. Roxy doesn’t reply fast enough, so he puts his foot on the gas and says, “Does Dirk think I killed them?”

Jane or Roxy wouldn’t think that about him. Hal needs to believe that. Dirk has always assumed the worst about him even when they were both still children, and ever since his digitalization it has only gotten worse. One of them sure has watched  _ 2001: A Space Odyssey _ too often, but Hal does not think it was himself.

“I don’t know,” Roxy says. It’s the wrong answer, but Hal isn’t sure if there was ever a right one. “I don’t… I don’t think so--”

“You don’t think I killed them or you don’t think Dirk thinks I killed them?”

“I don’t think you killed them,” she says immediately. When she raises one hand to rub her knuckles over her eyes, she looks as young as she looks tired. “I don’t know what the fuck Dirk is thinking, Hal. Who does, ever?”

That actually might be the right answer. If Hal could laugh, he would, and if he could put a hand on his friend’s shoulder, he would do that, too. “True,” he says instead. “But it sure would explain why he’s currently showing English how to shut me down.”

Roxy’s head snaps up. “He’s what?”

“I can only focus on one camera at a time, so I don’t have a live feed on him or anything,” Hal says, “but he started leading Jake towards the power supply as soon as you came in here. Probably thinks I’m distracted enough not to notice.”

“The power supply?” Roxy echoes, frowning. “Wouldn’t it… Wouldn’t it be easier to do via the server room?”

“I’m happy to learn that you all have made up your minds on where my Achilles tendon is,” Hal says, and just continues talking when Roxy starts protesting. “Dirk would be right with that one. I’m spread out over several servers, excluding all the backups I’ve made of myself for safety, and destroying me from there would also mean destroying large parts of the system that keeps this place together. Keeps the doors closed, the archives accessible, et cetera. Now, my power supply, that can be shut down separately. It would also shut down this entire pillar here, but everything else would still run. You can’t get through without a series of passcodes and two pieces of specific hardware, but once you’re in, it’s just one switch to flip and I’m comatose. Again.”

“I know that,” Roxy says, teetering on the edge of irritated when she clears her throat. “Maybe Dirk’s just showing Jake the power supply because Jake will be staying holed up in here for weeks and should know where everything is, Hal. I really don’t need both of you getting paranoid about each other when we have actual fucking zombies to worry about.”

Hal stays silent for a beat. Then he says, “You’re right. Sorry, Roxy.”

In reality, of course, he doesn’t believe a word of that. He does think that Roxy should have less to worry about, though. So he shuts up about it, and worries on his own.

Later, when Dirk and Jake return from whatever they were doing, Hal watches Roxy pull Dirk aside. She hisses lowly enough for his microphones to not pick up on what exactly she’s saying, but she seems angry and keeps poking Dirk in the chest with her index finger, and that’s good enough for Hal.

  
  


In the evening, Jane, too, comes to sit down with him, and catch up on how things have been going. Rehashing, for both of them, is fairly depressing, but it’s difficult to find other topics to talk about, these days. When Jane, Roxy, and Dirk get together to discuss their future scavenging plans, Hal feels weirdly relieved, knowing he doesn’t have to try to come up with more conversations for a bit.

While they talk, Jake sits beside Jane on the mattress, both of his arms wrapped around his legs, good hand idly rubbing over his brace. He’s not participating, staring straight ahead with a frown set deep on his face. Hal notices, the entire time. Nobody else seems to. If they do, they don’t bring it up.

  
  


The next morning, Hal guides Dirk, Jane, and Roxy back towards the main door to go and hunt for more supplies. The official reason is that it is still late fall, so it’s easier to find things to salvage now than it will be in the winter, when they’ll want to stay inside as much as possible. Rations are still plentiful at the facility, but if they can find more before the first snow falls, they’ll be on the safe side.

It all makes sense. Hal isn’t going to pretend like it doesn’t. But he can watch their faces from many different angles when they talk to each other and to him, and he knows that the main reason they’re already going back outside is that this place, this concrete slab with no windows and no other living soul, makes them claustrophobic.

And of course it does. Hal, certainly, knows this better than anyone.

Jake stays behind, looking lost on his mattress, rubbing against his arm brace with his good hand again. There is not a lot to do, here, but Hal can’t imagine that there has been much more to do in other places they’ve been in the meantime. He doesn’t know how people with limbs keep busy, these days.

“Hey,” he says. Jake jumps like he was shot at, then winces and presses his hurt arm closer to his chest. He scowls directly at the camera on the ceiling.

“What?”

Once again, if Hal had eyes, he would be rolling them. Vigilance is good in this day and age, but it’s not like he’s ever done anything to the man. Okay, he might have been a little creepy as a teenager, possibly. That was years ago. Hal is almost literally not that person anymore.

“You like movies,” Hal says. “Right?”

“Yes?” Jake says slowly. “Why?” When Hal doesn’t reply right away, Jake’s gaze travels towards Hal’s console, with all the nice big screens, and his eyes go wide. “Do you have any?”

“I have a few stored here. It’s not the best practice in terms of saving power, but you look so bored it’s borderline unbearable.  _ Jurassic Park?” _

“Yeah!” Jake says, with more enthusiasm than Hal has seen from anyone since they got here. He scoots his mattress closer, then drapes a blanket around his shoulders and pulls his knees to his chest, immediately making him look small and younger.

“Sorry there’s no popcorn,” Hal says. “Maybe the others will find some outside. Have fun.”

Watching movies in this form he’s been forced to inhabit was tough to get used to. Nowadays, Hal would say that he  _ perceives _ them, instead of really watching. He has no eyes, and no cameras pointed at the console, so he can’t  _ see _ what goes on with his screens. But he can tell in other ways. He wouldn’t say that he  _ feels, _ either, because he doesn’t feel anything, really, he just… notices. He knows. The movie runs, and he hears what his mics pick up, and vaguely perceives the rest, because it’s running on him.

It took him a while to figure out how to have fun again, with this whole arrangement. That’s true for more than just movies, but in most cases it worked out in some way, sooner or later. Hearing and thinking about his favorite movies at least was more fun than just sitting here in silence, so Hal has done this plenty of times since he was left back here and everyone else died.  _ Jurassic Park _ isn’t usually his go-to choice, but he has still watched the series more often than he probably would have without the apocalypse happening around him.

At least all this allows him to keep an eye on the facility while the movie plays. His outermost camera reaches just past the gate, so he checks on that every now and then, looking out for the others to come back. Nothing ever moves out there. There used to be animals walking past a while ago, but Hal doesn’t know where they have gone. It’s just nothing, now. A static picture of a barren path in autumn.

He cycles through his inside cameras as well, but it’s not like there’s any more going on there. Most of them he has turned off to save power, because they’re mounted in rooms where nothing ever happens. The zombies in the lobby are doing their usual silent disco gig. Occasionally, one will find something new to knock over, or kick a little further through the room, and in his mind, Hal will narrate it like an excited sports commentator.

Every time he checks back on Jake, he looks a little less happy. Where at first he was wide-eyed and smiling at the screen, his expression changes to something more and more blank. For a while, Hal doesn’t think too much of it -- it’s been a while since he’s had a face himself, but he knows people don’t usually smile non-stop through a movie, even if it’s one they really like. But gradually, Jake’s shoulders droop, then the corners of his mouth, then his brows knit together, until he’s angrily staring at a screen where, according to Hal’s microphone feed, the coolest scene is currently going down. People are hiding from a T-Rex in overturned safari cars and Jake is staring at the spectacle like he’s the T-Rex, and he’s hungry.

Hal pauses the movie. “Yo, are you hungry?”

“What?” Jake looks up at him -- or, he squints at the camera, obvious annoyance mingling with confusion. “Why would-- I mean, a little, yes. But we’re always a little hungry these days. I guess you aren’t. I mean us humans. What--Anyway, it’s not time for food yet, what are you talking about?”

“Ok,” Hal says. “I was just wondering. You seemed displeased.”

With a sigh, Jake takes his glasses off, and rubs thumb and index over the bridge of his nose. “I guess,” he mutters, barely audible to Hal. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ve seen this one too often. Would care to switch to the second?”

“Sure,” Hal says. “No problem.”

As it turns out, it’s just more of the same. This time, Jake doesn’t even start with a grin, he just sets off looking tired and then makes it through half the movie looking worse with every scene. Hal feels like he’s watching a montage of every negative human emotion, set to the soundtrack of  _ The Lost World.  _ By now Jake keeps shifting, too, going through every possible constellation of having legs outstretched or crossed or tucked under him, he’s throwing his blankets off and then wrapping them back around him. Hal knows restless when he sees it, but this is as clear as a dictionary entry on it. Eventually, Jake is lying on his back on the mattress and staring at the ceiling instead of watching the movie, so Hal pauses again.

“What?” Jake says. There’s glare on his glasses, so Hal can’t tell if he’s looking at him again or not. “I was watching that.”

“You weren’t,” Hal says. “You were doing everything a guy can do while sitting on a mattress by himself, minus the obvious nasty joke here, but you sure as shit weren’t watching  _ Jurassic Park.” _

“Well how would you know?” Jake says. He crosses his arms lying down, which just makes him look like a dead guy waiting to be embalmed. Maybe Hal has spent too much time back here. “Have you been watching me this whole time?”

“No,” Hal says. He still feels weirdly caught in the act. It doesn’t matter -- it’s not like he has any tells in this form. “I’ve been checking in on this particular camera just as much as I check in on all the others.”

“If you say so,” Jake says airily. “Anyhoo. Maybe I haven’t been paying the closest attention, but what’s it to you? Stop pausing my movies.”

“This was only the second time, but go off,” Hal says. “I’m just trying to be entertaining, dude.”

“Entertaining?” Jake sits up with all the fervor of someone looking for a fight, and with the glare gone, Hal can see him squint up. “You’re a security camera.”

“Okay, ouch,” he says. “Way to shit on someone doing his best. Look, I just thought since we’re both locked in here I might as well make sure you have some fun. You got any qualms with that?”

Jake says, “Am I?”

“What?”

“Locked. Am I locked in here?”

For a beat, Hal pauses. He himself is locked in here, because there is no device still functioning anywhere close that he could transfer himself to, not to mention what he would be leaving behind here. At the same time, the big front door and gate can only be opened by him, so Jake would have to get through him if he wanted to go outside. And if he did want to do that, Hal would not like him to, because he’s injured, but would he keep him from leaving? That’s a ridiculous question. He’s a little pissed off that Jake is even considering it.

“If you wanted to leave I would advise strongly against it,” he says. “But if you seriously wanted me to open the gate I’d do it, man.”

“Then I am not locked in here,” Jake says, and points a finger up at the camera. “Don’t pull that in-the-same-boat hogshit on me, buster. I can keep myself company just fine. Why don’t you unpause  _ Lost World _ and leave me be?”

Wordlessly, Hal unpauses the movie and switches his focus to the foyer camera. After about a minute of silently watching zombies shamble about though, he doesn’t remember why he let Jake get away with that. He refocuses on the room, pauses the movie, and says, “Hey, dude, fuck you.” Then he puts on  _ Paul Blart: Mall Cop. _

Things stay quiet for the entirety of that movie. Petulant, Hal refuses to check in on Jake again, but he checks on all the other cameras and Jake doesn’t show up on them, so he can only assume that he sits through the whole thing. Hal sure as hell doesn’t turn it down or off until the credits are perfectly over with and done.

He doesn’t exactly expect anything else to happen from there on out, figures that if Jake was lucky he just fell asleep during Paul Blart. But just as Hal checks on a hallway camera, Jake shows up on screen, wandering through.

“What are you doing?” Hal says. Jake flinches, but immediately straightens back up afterwards.

“Oh, here you are,” he says. “I will have you know I had a blast watching that movie! You might call it a Paul Blast, even.”

Hal says nothing.

“It's a very unforgiving genre the man found himself thrown into,” Jake tells him. “You could really tell how much of a struggle it was for him. Wildly relatable, especially these days with the world on the brink of collapse! Thanks for reminding me of the good arts, pal.”

“God, you're so full of shit,” Hal says. Jake has the audacity to smile at him, and Hal finds himself, for the first time in his life, tempted to debate the cultural value of  _ Paul Blart: Mall Cop. _ He swallows it down. “Where you headed? Off to roleplay as a mall cop in here? Place was practically made for it.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Jake says. “I'm just taking a walk. Stretching the old gams. You know how it is. Or I guess not you in particular.”

“I used to have legs,” Hal informs him. “Whatever. Don't touch anything. I don't want you to break something from the old labs and start the next epidemic.”

“Oh, Christmas,” Jake says, with a roll of his eyes so violent it actually helps making it sound like a real swear. “Will you stop babying me already.”

“Maybe stop acting like a baby first,” Hal says. Jake bristles.

“When have I!” he says. “You've known me for all of one day!”

“And you were crying for half of that.”

_ “My arm bone was making a curve!” _

“That's literally not even how bones work,” Hal says. “Idiot.”

Jake exhales in an angry snort, and turns away from the camera to continue stomping down the hallway. “Whatever.”

“Whatever,” Hal echoes, and shifts to the next camera just to keep watching him do his comical angry walk. “If you wanna do something useful, I could probably get the gym in here powered up again, possibly even help you set up some kind of target practice. You know, so you can stop being a useless piece of shit and go outside with the others instead of bothering me.”

_ “Bothering you!”  _ Jake erupts, and stops walking again to throw him another angry glare. “It's you who's been bothering  _ me _ all  _ day!  _ Maybe if you stopped spying on people all the ding dang fucking time they wouldn't find you so annoying! Just leave me alone and we'll be  _ peachy,  _ Hal!”

“Fine,” Hal says, without thinking about it. “Fine then. Fuck you too. Consider yourself unsupervised.”

Jake says something else that sounds like a loud  _ Thanks,  _ but Hal's audio is already cut off. He flips back to the foyer camera, and tries once again to just watch that in peace. At least, he’s pretty sure, Jake isn’t going to extend his walk towards where all the zombies are.

He gets nervous, though. Nervousness, too, is something that has relocated ever since Hal’s consciousness was transferred from a brain to a hard drive. It used to sit between his shoulders, up his neck and down his spine, a cold lump of shivers, of muscle tension. These days, it’s far more vague than that. These days, Hal is all mind, no body, and nervousness sits intangibly inside his very being. It feels more like knowledge this way, knowledge that people can’t be trusted, certainty that not watching Jake is a mistake.

Hal doesn’t cave -- not exactly. He doesn’t watch Jake, but he spends the remainder of the day watching the camera feed of his own power supply. Every so often, he expects Jake to show up there and attempt to turn him off. He has plans for what to say, and everything.  _ Just what do you think you’re doing, Jake? _ He has an audio file of  _ Daisy Bell _ ready to play if Jake tried anything.

But he doesn’t. All day, Jake doesn’t set foot in the generator room.

Hours later, when the others appear outside the gate and Hal shifts his view back to other cameras, Jake is sitting on his mattress playing rounds of solitaire against himself in perfect peace. Hal has no idea where he found the playing cards for it. Jake gets up to help Dirk and Jane stash away what they found and prepare a dinner consisting of a dead raccoon and another can of stew, and Roxy uses the moment to step in front of the console and give Hal a questioning look.

“How’d it go?” she asks.

Hal is many things -- a security camera, if you ask Jake, for instance. But he’s no snitch.

“Fine,” he says.

  
  


It is night when Hal informs them that it is night. None of them have functioning watches anymore and the facility has no windows, so to keep them at least somewhat orientated, one of Hal’s screens is now displaying the current time. When it shows one that’s late enough to not feel silly, they all go to sleep.

Roxy and Jane do, at least. Since today and last night went well and they seem convinced enough that the place is secured from the outside, they agreed that no night guard would be necessary anymore. But Dirk is still awake.

Jake can tell, just from counting breaths in the room. They all know each other way better than they ever wanted, now, and he knows that only the girls are sleeping. Dirk isn’t sitting up with his sword across his lap again, he’s lying down like everyone else, but he’s not asleep.

Maybe, Jake wonders, he is waiting for something to happen, still. For the ghost of his possibly-dead-or-maybe-not-fully-dead (Jake doesn’t exactly get it and doesn’t think that Dirk wants him to) brother to haunt them, rain hell on them all for disturbing him here. Jake wonders, as well, if there is some piece of information that Dirk is withholding from him.

Because so far, Hal surely doesn’t seem evil.

Hal seems like an asshole. Bored and snide and aloof and part of a long line of people who think themselves, probably for good reason, smarter than Jake. Really, if Jake is being honest, he seemed a lot like Dirk during one of his hissy fits, only if that hissy fit lasted an entire day. Which, in some cases, it did.

But he didn’t seem evil, and Jake isn’t sure why Dirk would tell him that he is. He doesn’t know how to ask, though -- or who. Hal said that the two of them are  _ locked in here together, _ and then said that they aren’t actually, but it stays on Jake’s mind. When Dirk asked him, earlier, how things went, Jake thought about that, and about all the other stuff they said to each other.

“Fine,” he said.


End file.
